Robbie Swinnerton serves up morsels from the foodiest city on the planet

food photos

12/26/2015

December 2015: After a prolonged (4-year) stay of execution, the wonderful Omotesando Koffee is due to finally close its doors at the end of the month. That leaves only a few more days to revisit – or discover for the first time – this modern/retro Tokyo classic.

This was my original post from September 2011…

We dropped into Omotesando Koffee over the weekend and loved it. Not that it's the kind of place you'd stumble upon by chance in the grid of residential streets that lie between Omotesando and Gaienmae.

But it's really worth tracking down. Because it's a contemporary classic. You enter through an old-style gateway, into a neat little manicured garden...

And in the middle of that room is the counter and gleaming red/silver espresso machine, all 'enclosed' in an open cuboid frame of black steel.

Owner Eiichi Kunitomo is a trained barista, and perfected his technique while living in Ischia (Tyrrhenian Sea / Gulf of Naples) for a while. An Osaka native, he says he'd love to take this idea down to Kansai, but it's way behind Tokyo in terms of espresso culture.

He also cooks what he calls his koffee kashi (sweets). He describes them as baked custard, but essentially they're canelés – dark and slightly caramel bitter on the outside, nice and moist and yellow inside – which he cooks in cute little cubes in a diminutive oven hidden in a side alcove...

You can buy them singly to have with your coffee, or in stylishly packaged sets of five to take home with you...

And that's it. You stand at the counter while he prepares your coffee. Then when it's ready and dispensed into its cardboard cup, you nurse it standing on the side of the room or retreat to one of the benches in the garden (or carry it back to your office/apartment).

There's just one downside to Omotesando Koffee: it's temporary – and the clock is ticking down. Kunitomo only has this space until the end of the year (when the house is due to be demolished). At least that was the initial arrangment with the owner/landlord. However, there has been such a strong buzz about the place that the owner's agreed to let it continue into next year – and possibly even longer. We've got our fingers crossed...

But even if that does happen, then Kunitomo will just take his coffee machine, his kashi oven and his counter (and that striking steel frame) and find another location.

That's the beauty of his concept – it can be taken anywhere. And if you look at his web site, you can see the list of places where he envisages setting up more of his minimalist coffee shops.

UPDATE (June 2013): Another coffee shop that is based on a very similar template to Omotesando Koffee -- thanks to Kunitomo's involvement as producer -- is Café Kitsuné, which opened earlier this year. The menu and style is very similar, with the same cuboid Kashi canelés and a similar blend of old and traditional.

02/06/2015

Is there any food more comforting and satisfying than a nabe? Sitting around a bubbling casserole watching your dinner cook satisfies all the senses, nourishing the soul as you fill and heat your body. So why aren’t there more places like Nabeya?

This old-time gem lies hidden away in the dingy, seen-better-days back streets of Otsuka, on the northernmost section of Tokyo's Yamanote loop line.

Chef Hiroshi Fukuda helped his father set up the restaurant in the hard-scrabble years following World War Two. Serving nabe hot pots was one of the simplest, most nutritious styles of cooking. The restaurant premises have been through a couple of incarnations since then – until the late 1980s, it was a wonderful old two-story wooden house; now Nabeya occupies the bottom two floors of a condominium building – but the style of cuisine remains unchanged.

Fukuda is 79 now and still hale and spry. Over the years he has become an authority on the traditional food culture of Tokyo, with books to his name about the way people used to eat in the days when the city was still called Edo and was ruled by shoguns.

He runs Nabeya with his wife, who greets you at the entrance, waits as you climb out of your shoes, and then shows you to your private room.

There are just four chambers, all traditional in style with tatami mats, shoji screens over the windows, timber beams and some beautiful scrolls and wall hangings. The largest of the upstairs rooms is the most impressive.

If you (or your knees) are not that thrilled about sitting at a low table, there are two alternatives. The room on the ground floor is equipped with horigotatsu-style seating (a table with a leg-well) for parties of four to six.

If there are just two of you (or four smallish people), the room you are likely to be assigned is the smallest one (upstairs), which has a proper table and chairs (on the tatami).

As the name proclaims, Nabeya serves only one kind of food – just the way it has done ever since it opened: nabe hot pots, cooked at the table in front of you.

Basically, the classic wintertime dish is a superlative chicken/seafood/ vegetable hot pot. Other places would just call this yose (mixed). But here it's been given a more poetic name: Horai-nabe, after a mountain of Buddhist legend.

It's a fixed (and fixed-price) menu, shared by everyone at the table. If you want to make adjustments to the ingredients, the time to do that is when you phone to reserve.

The meal always opens with a tray of simple zensai (appetisers). This is what we were served early this winter:

The sashimi (back right) will change with the season: it's saba (mackerel) here. And so will the aemono (dressed vegetables; back left). There will also be a small serving of tsukudani relish (in the center): in this case it's iwa-nori seaweed.

But the dishes at the front stay the same year-round: tamago-yaki omelet; and a couple of dried urume-iwashi (sardines), which are very simple but full of umami, and nice to chew on while sipping on beer or sake.

Here's another zensai tray, this one served earlier last autumn…

While you're nibbling into this, preferably with a flask of sake at hand, your nabe is being readied. The casserole itself contains a special dashi stock made from katsuobushi (bonito flakes) but, unusually, using no kombu (kelp).

Fukuda says this is the way it was done in the old days, when traders in Osaka monopolised the kombu trade from Hokkaido, leaving little for the folks in Edo. There's another reason: kombu tends to make the dashi cloudy; without it the colour is a clear, golden brown.

These will include salmon, cod, hamaguri clams, a good variety of vegetables, chicken, tofu, soft-boiled quail’s eggs, noodles and mushrooms, along with a couple of saimaki-ebi – young kuruma-ebi (king prawns) – so fresh they are still quivering.

When it's been brought up to heat, that's the time for the ingredients to be carefully placed into it, a little at a time.

Not that you need to do the actual cooking. This is handled by your waitress. She places the ingredients expertly into the bubbling broth and then, with equal deftness, ladles them onto your plate when they are cooked.

The saimaki-ebi are one of the highlights. But everything tastes good when you're watching and smelling your dinner cooking.

Mrs. Fukuda will also look in from time to time, to check on things and attend to the final stages of the nabe.

You will have already eaten the udon noodles that came with all the other ingredients. Now it's time for ojiya – rice cooked down in the last of the broth with a beaten egg until it forms a rich porridge.

This is rib-sticking, stomach-filling, bulking-up fare, expressly designed to fill the last remaining stomach space. You will not leave Nabeya feeling hungry. In the slightest.

A light dessert is served to close the meal. Usually it will be just a sliver or two of fruit, such as this beautifully ripe persimmon that had been lightly seared to blister its skin – as much for appearance as flavour.

Sometimes, though, Fukuda gets creative and comes up with his own ideas. The last time we were there, he also produced a dessert that looked spectacular – in fact, almost molecular in appearance. Tofu encased in an angular layer of clear kanten jelly, served with a thick sweet kuro-mitsu (raw sugar) syrup.

In terms of flavour, the tofu was too pronounced, and the kanten too bland. But it was so good to look at. And it slipped down beautifully…

Finally it is time to settle up – at ¥15,000 per head, plus incidentals, it's always more than you expect, especially as you are asked to pay in banknotes (rather than plastic) – and then make your way out into the night. Returning slowly to the 21st century from this little time warp that feels as though it is stuck forever in the postwar Showa years.